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SK16 Games's Archive

My results were far better than the other two LDs I’ve participated in. #111 in Theme and #193 in Innovation, that’s awesome and just gives me motivation to aim for the top 100 next time!

As I participated in the jam this time, without a team and made all stuff myself as if it were for the compo, I think these results are pretty good. I made some nice stats below, comparing how I did my previous LDs:

Stat 1: Fixed Ranking

Top percent calculated as #Ranking divided by total entries for each LD compo/jam.

— I know this post is looong, but I would be so happy if you would read it and maybe comment your thoughts —

So I finished my game very tight to the deadline, but I finished it! YAY

About the game

So you are an (evil) empire that wants to take over the universe. You start by choosing your own name such as “Ludum Dare Galaxy Empire”, “Das Dritte Reich”, “Little Tim’s Multi-World Domination”, “DPRK” or something else creative for you to come up with. (HAS TO BE EVIL) To connect worlds to your empire, make a spaceship by resources and start connecting!

Bad beginning

First of all I started making the game too late. I stayed up all night and waited for the theme to be announced at 3:00 (danish time) and went to sleep after that. I woke up at about 13:00 and was kind of too lazy to get up and start Ludum Dare’ing. So I got some food and started making a game. I thought I would use Unity, but I just wasted my first hours to find out my idea was too hard to make (I have only made one game in Unity before…) So… I ended up using Game Maker: Studio like last time, and I had to come up with a new idea…

The thumbnail for my game

The progress

Time passed and I finally had an idea but it was kind of unclear, so I started by making the graphics. I worked and worked and checked twitter and facebook and worked and checked youtube and worked and got distracted again and worked and so on. When it was around 4:00 and I decided to get some sleep my game wasn’t even near a game yet. Half time; not at all half done. The next day I was a bit more concentrated, but my idea wasn’t clear enough yet. I made some sketches on paper to get a better overview of what my game was about. I worked a lot without being sure what the game would turn in to. But around 6 hours before deadline I thought my idea was done enough, and I just had to finish the game too.

The original idea:

At that point my idea was something like: You have a planet. The population grows and there is a maximum number of people the Earth has room for, so you have to get the population over to other planets. To get to different planets you need spaceships, you make by resources. The Earth also has an amount of resourses that grows. There are different planets, that have different: number of spaceships needed to connect, speed of getting resources and max capacity of people. So you had to populate all the planets without getting overpopulated and getting a lot of resources.

But… All I had done at that time was: The system for getting resources and population, displaying everything over the planet, and upgrading and buying stuff. Now I just needed to make the player able to connect to the other planets by using the spaceships… And long story short: I used some hours to figure out how to “copy” the system to more planets and ended up not getting it to work. So it was 2-3 hours before deadline I only had one working planet, and no connection-stuff.

The final one:

So… I changed the idea totally, so you just connected to other worlds with spaceships, and it just said “connected”, instead of the idea of every planet having different population, stuff to upgrade, buttons etc. And by doing that the “population” thing would make no sense, so I removed that too.

So the deadline came closer and I worked as fast as I could. I remembered there was also the “submission hour” and quick made some music, and finished the game itself in the last 10 minutes of the submission hour (Yes, it was technically over deadline, but fuck it…). I uploaded it, and did the porting after the deadline. SLEEP. The next day I made the thumbnail and uploaded the source.

Conclusion

The game:

I feel okay about the final result, but the game turned out to be a bit boring… Overall this was probably the worst – out of 2 LD compos, and 4 total game jams I participated in – game I’ve made. But again, it’s okay; A nice little game.

Looking forward to see the results!

What I’ll do better next:

Next time I will work more focused instead of the on/off-work as I did this time. Get up. Food. Jam.

I will learn Unity more, and test some ideas before the compo starts AKA do the warm-up weekend, so I’m ready to make a game.

So my friend @Sodakurt and I made a game for the #GlitchJam hosted by Game Jolt (sadly we didn’t make it in time, for the jam itself)

The game is called BUS STOP SIMULATOR and yea, it’s about waiting for the bus… Or is it? As it were an entry for Glitch Jam the theme in the game is glitches, so we’ve tried to make some sort of horror game out of it (not what you expect from the title, we know)

but yea, it’s still NOT DONE at all yet, the main features of the game work, but the “horror part” of it is far from done… But yea take a look and maybe follow on game jolt to get notified about release and updates ;D